Yext, a company providing entreprise search solutions based on Natural Language Processing and AI, publish anonymized data on their Search Data Hub. These data are samples of listing and local page data across a variety of search engines, and other digital endpoints collected by Yext from their clients. They allow for exploring insights on consumer behavior trends — including shifts in search volume and foot traffic trends by industry.
We analyzed these data for the Legal Services industry. What can we learn from Yext Search Data Hub that is relevant for personal injury lawyers? We present here our key findings.
Yext kindly provided us with a subset of the data from the Search Data Hub: data about Legal Services (subvertical) coming from U.S. companies. We enriched these data with some key spot comparisons observed directly on the online Search Data Hub.
Yext mentions that “the data is comprised of a sample of listing and local page data across a variety of search engines, and other digital endpoints. Insights are shown only on a region and industry level where there are sufficient businesses, locations, and search engine data sources to maintain anonymity and privacy for Yext customers and where Yext customers have adopted the platform for a sufficient period of time to provide a meaningful comparison year over year. As data may vary between regions due to, among other things, the sample size or availability of data for certain businesses and subverticals, industry insights may not be comparable across regions.”
The data published by Yext, and presented in this analysis, are better compared over time. However, as the metrics are averages over a sample, we can still compare the absolute values of the legal services to the values of the rest of the industry.
Sample sizes:
The impressions represent the number of times a sample of listings appeared in search results across Google Maps, Google Search, Bing, Facebook, and the broader network. And the clicks, the number of times they were clicked.
There is a sudden increase in the Average Extended Network Clicks since summer 2021.
Visually, there does not seem to be a large correlation between the impressions and the clicks. This is reflected in the Pearson correlation coefficient, which is \(r = 0.21\). This coefficient ranges from 0, there is no linear correlation, the clicks have no relations to impressions, to 1, there is a perfect correlation between impressions and clicks. There is a small correlation between the number of impressions and the clicks, meaning that the number of clicks is not completely independent of the number of impressions. However, this relation is very far from being perfect and an increase in the number of impressions is not necessarily, directly and completely reflected in the number of clicks.
As Yext is sharing both impressions and clicks, we can compute the average Click-Through Rate (CTR): \(CTR = clicks / impressions\).
The average CTR in legal services for longtail keywords in the extended network (Google Maps, Google Search, Bing, Facebook, and the broader network) is of 2.62%.
We compare the Extended Network Impressions and Clicks from the legal services to the same metrics for all the industries. By doing so, we compare the performance of listings in the legal services to the global average.
When measured on the whole industry, there is a much larger correlation between the impressions and the clicks: the Pearson correlation coefficient is \(r = 0.82\). This means that fluctuations in the impressions are well reflected in the clicks, albeit not perfectly (perfectly would mean r = 1).
The Average Extended Network Impressions for Longtail Keywords for all industries together is 2.7 times larger than for legal services. The gap is even larger for the Clicks: it is 9.3 times larger for all industries together than for legal services. This suggests that, in this sample, legal services have generally less success in turning impressions into clicks. This is reflected in the CTR. The CTR of all industries together is on average of 8.76%, much higher than the average CTR for the legal services: 2.62%.
We can index the values measured for the legal services and the whole industry to the value of 100% on January 2019. By doing so, we can compare their trends more precisely and see if the values for the legal services follow the same fluctuations as the industry.
We can see that the Clicks in the legal services seem to follow the general trends well. This is reflected in the Pearson correlation coefficient: \(r = 0.57\). However, this is does not seem to be the case for the Impressions. The Impressions in the legal services do not follow the general trends well visually and there is no correlation: \(r = 0\). Could this be because the impressions do not depend from the general presence or behavior of users whereas the clicks do?
This chapter focuses on the Google ecosystem.
The Average Google Maps Views Per Location represents the number of times the listing was viewed on a Google Map. The Average Google Search Views Per Location represents the number of times the listing was viewed on Google Search. Google Map Views and Google Search Views together represent the total number of impressions listings receive across the Google ecosystem.